Welcome to the first day of the new changes here on the blog! The first change you’ll notice is in the title of the blog, I have shifted the title to simply ‘Emma Lou,’ and each day will have a verb added to the end. For example, Mondays are Emma Lou Writes! Each Monday will be a little different, just something that has been on my mind that I’ve wanted to get out into actual words. And here we go with our first post!

March 13 and 14 were two of the scariest, most vulnerable, emotional days of my entire life. As I mentioned previously, the opportunity to attend Making Things Happen was a HUGE, unexpected blessing and it ended up being even more amazing than I had expected. Since today is the first day I’m posting my blog to my Facebook, I imagine a few of you reading are unaware of what MTH is, so I am going to spend most of Part 1 of this series explaining what this conference is all about, for both the new readers and for posterity.

Making Things Happen is essentially a conference designed to help you live your best life. Lara, Emily, and Gina put it best on the website when they say that MTH is “an intensive designed to fire you up and get you on a powerful path to making big things happen in life and in business.” The conference attracts mostly small business owners, but really just people who are passionate about community and supporting people as they work HARD to live the life they want. I’ve described it to friends at home as a sort of ‘self help conference,’ but not as weird as that sounds!

This years conference was two days, the first was focused on conquering fears, getting down to what really matters, saying yes to what is important and no to what isn’t, and figuring out what really fires you up. A group of 100 women and men, along with the three hosts and five amazing guest speakers, all worked together to really dig deep into what is going on in our lives, what is working, and what isn’t. And friends, this thing gets emotional. My roommates and I walked in and were confused by the tissue boxes at the end of each aisle, but by the time the first 3 people in the room had introduced themselves I had tears running down my cheeks. The most beautiful part about this gathering was the honesty that pulsated through the room, I have never felt more relaxed and welcomed in a group in my life. Few of these women knew each other going in, but I think we all left feeling that even if we hadn’t met each other face-to-face, we were forever a community that would support one another through anything and everything.

The second day of the conference was focused on what Lara and Emily call Making Brands Happen, it is actually another business the two of them run, but they squashed all of the information that they usually give to clients into a 8 hour seminar and were gracious enough to share with all of us. As someone who has no plans to own their own business, I was unsure of how beneficial to me this day would be. However, I took SO MUCH away from this. I learned all about how to conduct myself when I eventually get a ‘big girl job,’ how to treat others in business, and my biggest take away was from one of my favorite bloggers, Emily. Emily really taught me that this blog could be used as something fun and creative, it doesn’t have to be perfect and have the end goal of making money. And that is why I’m really dedicating myself to making this blog the best in can be for me, and not worrying too much about what others think of it.

I’ll end here, that was quite a mouthful, but next Monday I’ll be back with the three biggest lessons I learned at MTH and how I’m working to incorporate them into my life. Until then, I’ll leave you with this wonderful bit of inspiration from Lara, if you haven’t checked out her website download page yet, you have no idea what you’re missing!